Cyanogen is shutting down services and OS by the end of the year

Cyanogen Inc. has just announced that it will shut down its services and its OS by December 31st. Through a brief blog post, they announced that CyanogenMod will continue to be available for the people who wants to build it.

The short notice announcement comes after Cyanogen experienced difficult moments through the past months. It has laid off a great part of the staff and also it has let go its CEO. The owners of the devices where Cyanogen OS runs have to move to the CyanogenMod ROM, which is not really a commercial product.

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“As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services, and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than 12/31/16. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally,” stated the company on Friday.

Cyanogen dreams to have a better version of Google are over

If you don’t like the Google’s Android that runs on your phone or tablet, you can replace it with a custom ROM, a modified version of Android which is built by volunteers. That was exactly what CyanogenMod offered: an open source community-developed version of Android, but it wasn’t commercialized.

That became the objective of some of the developers in CyanogenMod in 2013 when they announced they had the required funds to build a commercial version of CyanogenMod. They expected to work with phone makers to install their software on the devices. Once, former CEO Kirk Mcmaster said that his company was putting a bullet on Google. However, as Google’s Android continues to go strong, the dream of Cyanogen seems to be over.

The company announced that their services and OS are going to be shut down next week before the year ends. A great part of the staff including its CEO has been laid off. However, CyanogenMod will be available for anyone who desires to install it personally.

What should Cyanogen’s customers do?

The next week’s update means that people whose devices work with Cyanogen OS, for example, OnePlus One – which was Cyanogen’s main partner – must change it to the CyanogenMod ROM, which is managed by a community of developers led by former co-founder Steve Klondik.

This transition, according to the New CEO Lior Tal, will be more attractive. Lior Tal, who was the former COO of Cyanogen, said that the new Cyanogen Modular OS is designed to achieve the original objective of an open and smarter Android without the limitation of requiring the full Cyanogen OS stack.

Now that Cyanogen services are coming to an end, Tal’s strategy is to unbundle what the Cyanogen OS offered so it can work alongside Google Android builds. Therefore, Cyanogen instead of putting a bullet on Google, it is adapting to live in Google’s world with every service Android provides.

“The new partnership program offers smartphone manufacturers greater freedom and opportunity to introduce intelligent, customizable Android smartphones using different parts of the Cyanogen OS via dynamic modules and MODs, with the ROM of their choice, whether stock Android or their own variant,” said Tal in a statement.